State of Desuetude
by Neo-Pop
Summary: It's human nature to destroy perfection. That's why it's so hard to repair damage when you could cause so much more. A team of survivors are fight for survival in the largest civil war known to man. The real question is whether they'll survive it or not. (I'm so bad at summaries, you have no clue; Rated T for language, depictions of violence, and some sexual themes.)


**_Penumbra_**

They say the perfect world is refined over time.

That society is shaped by its mistakes, that people eventually learn to forgive and forget, collaborate and trust the government to take care of them.

In the years of the future, it was impossible for anything to go wrong, not with the way people were living on the outside. But no one ever thought about peeking through the curtains to see how things were doing on the inside, to look for certain things.

Things like that can add to chaos, and no one would see it coming.

And even if they did and attempt to draw attention, no one would listen. Why would you want to hear something that promises corruption and destruction?

Things like that can break a utopian society pretty quickly, if people were to discover how close they were to the end. And the damage it inflicts starts in the form of an elaborate list.

Realization.

Denial.

Panic.

Destruction.

That very chain of events happened in the world, during the year of 2089.

And, like most situations, no one really wanted to acknowledge that it was even happening. Not in America. Not here, the land of freedom. Not where everything was safe.

But now they all knew that they were just fooling themselves so that they could sleep without fear crawling up their spines.

The world wasn't ending, not the Earth itself. Although it was slowly dying, the world would still continue on. Life would evolve.

She and her team just wouldn't live long to see it.

But how did this happen, why did it turn out like this? What caused mankind to edge closer to the brink of calamity? And what even caused it? "

_They never listened," he spat. He held her in his arms, close to the heat of his bruised body, her hand in his, his fingers laced through hers as he traced his thumb over her bloody lip. "They never listened because they couldn't comprehend how much wrong they did in the world." _

_"It wasn't that they couldn't to comprehend it." She stood atop the rubble of a crumbling building, her gun slung over her shoulder. Her face was painted crimson, and her eyes took on a whole new color of grim. "They didn't want to. What they thought was right wasn't enough to benefit most of us. We didn't see eye to eye on their terms. When we suffered, they chose to ignore it. They know it's their fault." The sirens grew louder, the screams amplified by the cold, narrow, concrete walls. She drew her gun once more. _

_"They didn't want to be crushed by guilt." She hopped down from her perch like a panther beginning their hunt, and soon after the pained shrieks grew louder. She understood. Her gaze was tinged black and white, her ears rung, and the mind-numbing pain in her skull grew stronger. _

_She could hear his breathing hitch, curses slithering between his teeth like agony-stricken serpents. "Why did they do this?" _

_The other lady draped in dark fabric looked up from her book with solemn eyes. Though she was unarmed, she still looked deadly. _

_"All they did was crack the glass. We were the ones who shattered it. We couldn't have done it if they'd never cracked the glass in the first place." She struggled against his arms, causing him to sputter, his hands gripping her shoulders as she sat up. "Your head, your head," he murmured, his voice nearly drowned out by the sounds of gunshots and dying wails, the fire that obscured the sun and the sound of crumbling buildings. _

_"Why are we like this?" For a moment the world grew still, eerily silent as the girl pursed her painted ebony lips. Then she stood, her torn dress falling to her knees. She looked above the wreckage serving as a structure of safety, shielding her eyes against... _

_The sun? The streetlights? But it was the afternoon. _

_Or was it morning again? _

_Had it already been an eternity? _

_"We're human," she finally replied. The sounds of chaos were brought back by her statement. _

_"It's in our nature to cause destruction." _

_She wanted to disagree. _

_But if she did, she'd be the same as the people who hid behind curtains._

A perfect society, filled with perfect human beings.

But if she were to wander back into the memories before Hell had drug its claws over the world, she'd see it; bits and pieces of shattering minds. The occasional panicked stare over the shoulder, the televisions with composed news anchors assuring the same thing over and over, their lips silent, but their subtitles were a scream.

"_We're under control, we're under control._"

**_We're under siege by ourselves_.**


End file.
